Basu: Iowa's Africans honor their prize-winner

Connections are forged among state's different immigrant groups

Oct. 17, 2013

Charity Mutegi of Kenya dances after arriving Wednesday outside the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates in Des Moines. She was given the 2013 Norman Borlaug Award for Field Research and Application. / Rodney White/The Register

Written by

Two weeks ago, John Soi and Catherine Swoboda, working with the World Food Prize, got the idea to incorporate local Africans into this year’s events honoring 38-year-old Kenyan prize-winner Charity Mutegi.

But Swoboda, the Des Moines east-side native who directs education programs for the World Food Prize Foundation, admits she and Soi, a former intern from Kenya, were fairly clueless about who the local Africans were.

While Latinos and Asians pull their various tribes together regularly to celebrate and showcase their heritages, the Des Moines Africans — estimated at 13,000 — remain largely under the radar. The 16 nationality groups represented don’t even know each other.

“I’m going to go back and read ‘Invisible Man,’ ” Swoboda declared Wednesday, of the Ralph Ellison novel about being black in America.

But that afternoon, the Africans were anything but invisible. The Riverwalk outside the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates buzzed with their rhythms and colors: An Eritrean youth choir. A Togolese dance group. A Burundian choir. Sudanese singers. A Kenyan girls’ dance troupe, and African drummers. It was the first time the various African nationalities in this city had ever come together.

Most of them had never heard of the World Food Prize and have no connection to the visiting laureates, scientists and government leaders who come to collect awards and speak on panels.

They fled wars and genocide to find safe harbor in America, working the 2 to 10 p.m. shifts at meatpacking plants, cleaning hotels or assisting the sick and disabled. By the last week of the month, many run out of food.

While the dignitaries talk about ending world hunger, these people know it firsthand.

But they also know dignity, and the transcendent power of national pride and role models, of dressing up in traditional outfits and performing for audiences who know the rhythms. “The incredible thing about this group is they’re not victims,” said Swoboda, 28, whose quest took her to “affluent west-side houses and cramped south-side apartments.” The journey was powerful, and became personal.

Motioning to a stunning, fashionably dressed woman who was singing and dancing to cheers, Swoboda said she had to write to a Marshalltown meatpacking plant to get the performer permission to miss work that day.

A chartered bus pulled up and a line of people descended, dressed in colorful headdresses and robes. One of those was Pastor David Madsen of Cottage Grove Presbyterian Church, a white American who ministers to a congregation that is 90 percent African, mostly Sudanese. The Sudanese are Des Moines’ largest African group, with as many as 7,000 members, followed by Liberians, with 3,000.

Madsen says most in his congregation work low-wage jobs or struggle with unemployment, though some have been to college and arrived as professionals.

Many of the Africans have never driven a car and walk two to three hours to get places, said Francis Chan, a South Sudanese deacon at St. Ambrose Cathedral, who helped organize the event. He said learning of the achievements of young African scientists including Mutegi — who was entirely African-educated — provides inspiration.

That was why George Simon brought his three high school-age sons and one daughter Wednesday: to “come and see how important education is.” He told them they could be the next Mutegis. “But they have to work hard to earn it.” Simon arrived as a refugee from Sudan in 1996, graduated from Drake University and continued his education. Now he travels to South Sudan to advise the new nation’s government on establishing a democracy.

Some successful Africans have started organizations to help counterparts back in Africa. Eric Idehen came to Des Moines in 2000 from Nigeria after winning the green card lottery. Working in banking, he founded a nonprofit organization for orphans called Cornerstone of Hope, in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Senegal.

He believes the connections forged for Wednesday’s event will continue: “I see the excitement. Old, young middle class are here.”

There were ironies. The World Food Prize aims to solve hunger in the developing world by increasing crop yields. Yet it was the developing world that offered up the successful role models to hungry people in America.

I’ve argued it’s not a lack of food supply, but unequal distribution of resources that’s at the root of hunger. You don’t have to go thousands of miles away to find hunger. It’s right under our noses, in the land of abundance.

Still, successful role models are good. And though I have my differences with the prize over GMO seeds and award to a Monsanto official, credit must be given where it is due. The foundation may not have intended to do the unprecedented legwork of pulling together diverse communities from the African diaspora living in Des Moines. But it did that by building grassroots connections that will help empower each one, with increased visibility, mutual support, pride and strength in numbers.